MIT Professor Explains the Crisis to the Masses

Business school professor Simon Johnson set out to make sense of the financial mess for students and the rest of us.

By

Alina Dizik

Updated Nov. 14, 2008 1:24 p.m. ET

While some business-school professors were busy planning emergency panels to deal with the economic crisis, MIT Sloan School of Management professor Simon Johnson helped launch the Baseline Scenario, a month-old blog with the tagline "what happened to the global economy and what we can do about it." A few weeks later, Mr. Johnson devised a two-month-long Global Crisis lecture series, open to anyone at the university, as a way to discuss developing economic events. The noncredit course launched last month and Mr. Johnson estimates that about 60 to 70 students attend his lectures, most of them from the...